Line Rangers review: how does it compare with the almost-identical Battle Cats?

Much like how Line Pop is a simple clone of Bejeweled with cuter graphics, Line Rangers is a game that plays almost identically to Battle Cats. But can you blame the Line Corporation, really? Line Pop was a runaway success, and Line Rangers has been dominating in both Google Play as well as the App Store.

While offering the same type of gameplay, there are some key differences between Line Rangers and Battle Cats. For the most part, though, Line Rangers is intentionally a much more difficult game, which means that if you hope to finish this game, you’d best either pray to the gasha gods or get your e-wallet out.

The road to victory is long, harsh, and features a clown horror house.

How to play

Gameplay is very simple yet addictive. The game is played on a horizontal 2D map where you and the enemy have bases on either end. Over time, you generate currency, which is used to buy troops to send onto the battlefield. More powerful troops cost more to produce and take longer to generate, so that’s where some strategy is required.

Your troops simply walk towards the enemy base, and if they encounter an enemy blocking their path, they will engage in battle. Your objective is to overwhelm the enemy troops and destroy their base. Up to this point, my description above could apply to either Line Rangers or Battle Cats, but it is out of the battlefield where things start to diverge.

In both games, the key to victory is having a good roster of characters to send into battle. While Battle Cats uses an evolution system to upgrade your cats (the rest being in-app purchases), Line Rangers has two systems with which you may acquire new characters. The first is by completing stages, but the characters given out at the end of levels are total and complete crap. The only way to get useful characters to fill your roster is through the gashapon system, a luck-based system that determines how far you can get in this game without paying money.

(See: Battle Cat has 7 million downloads but still can’t speak English )

Luck has everything to do with it

The way the gashapon system works is simple: by spending rubies you acquire through levelling up or paying for in the cash shop, you will randomly get a new character, much like rolling in (Puzzles and Dragons)[https://www.techinasia.com/puzzle-and-dragons-review-making-puzzles-violent/]. You can spend more rubies for a higher chance of getting more powerful characters, which is pretty much the only way you want to be spending your rubies. I guess that random factor adds a bit of excitement in the anticipation of getting a good character, but after using the system over ten times I only acquired one four-star ranked character, and not a single five-star ranker. Bummer for me.

3-star and below characters are often weak, and not worth upgrading. They tend to have a lower summon cost but they die so quickly it almost doesn’t matter.